


For Better or For Worse

by Ford_Ye_Fiji



Category: Coco (2017)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Héctor needs all the hugs, Julio has a cameo, Pre movie, Sadness, Save my skeleson, all of them - Freeform, but they ain't together in this fic, i mean mentions of past Imelda/Héctor, my Spanish is bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-31 02:06:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13965030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ford_Ye_Fiji/pseuds/Ford_Ye_Fiji
Summary: Time passes slowly.





	For Better or For Worse

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to get it all out in one go and then made too much angst, help.

As time passed, Imelda grew better and better.

That first horrible night had been utterly devestating. She had received Ernesto's apologetic letter about how her husband had decided that the world truly was his _familia_ , and abandoned them. How her Héctor had- had stole Ernesto's money and run, all so he could keep playing his _música_. Cocó's sheer non-understanding when Imelda had clenched her fists and spoke between angry tears that her 'papa was never coming back.'

All that was behind her now. The next day, Imelda had gotten up, tied back her hair and promptly threw out everything of Héctor's. The spare guitar was sold for extra _pesos_ , his music and pictures were trashed, his clothes were given away to the poor. In no time at all, there was no sign that he had ever lived there. Cocó watched this purging with wide eyes and a trembling bottom lip.

Imelda had picked her up with a soft sigh and hugged her close, " _Lo siento, mi vida._ It's alright. Don't cry. It's alright."

A few hours later, Imelda decided she would learn to make _zapatos_ , and Cocó still watched with those wide sad eyes. She watched wordlessly through all those weeks of Imelda's clumsy first attempts, through her mamá's first smile since Héctor's disappearance when she made her first shoe, through the _pesos_ she earned from her first customer.

Imelda could say a year later that things were actually alright. Cocó, now four years old, agreed with her, but she still did not tell her Mamá her greatest secret: that every night after she went to bed, she would sing her papi's lullaby _Recuérdame_ to get herself to sleep. She also didn't tell her that the horrible day after, when everything changed, she had picked up the pictures out of the trash and hidden them away.

(Cocó would still remember that gut-wrenching feeling when she saw the glint of tarnished gold in the dust. She had bent down and picked it up curiously. Eyes widening with a childlike horror at what it was. There was never something more devastating to a child than seeing her parent's wedding ring thrown away.)

Imelda grew older with every year that passed. (She did not miss music. She did not.) When Ernesto dared to show his face at their house a year or two after Héctor's... Departure, she'd slammed the door in his face. When she and her daughter had walked out afterwards to go to market, she'd found Héctor worn notebook left on the doorstep. The one he wrote all his music in. She dropped it in the rubbish heap with a hiss of, " _Pinche música._ " Cocó watched her mother curiously but didn't stop her.

(That same night, six year old Cocó Rivera retrieved the now smelly book and soaked up all she could of her _Papi's_ handwriting... The little mentions and drafts for letters to his wife and child. The tiny doodles of the two of them that he made when he couldn't concentrate. The picture of both of them nestled in between the pages, dogeared and worn as if he'd looked at it often.)

As her mother grew, working herself every day to exhaustion, Cocó grew too. The _niños_ chased her in the plaza now when she wasn't making shoes with her _mamá_. At night, she snuck out of the house to dance and sing with the _músicos_. If Imelda ever found out she surely would have been furious.

She never did, though.

When Cocó met Julio at one of these secret fervent dances, it was like the jilted world had been knocked right again. Months later she had to swallow the lump in her throat when Julio walked up to Imelda with a charming smile and the request to learn about shoemaking. He did not tell her that his previously chosen profession had been a _mariachi_. After the wedding Juilo, in this life, never picked up an instrument again.

Imelda ruled over the house with a strong sense of justice and a dry sense of humor. Her grandchildren delighted her and Julio brought along his sister Rosita. They made the normally quiet workshop a place of joy. Imelda had her _familia_ and that was all she really needed.

(When young Victoria asked her _abulela_ Imelda whether or not she had an _abuelo_ , Imelda spat on the ground and her words had dissolved into furious ranting. Cocó had laughed nervously and said almost _too_ carelessly, "No, not anymore, _mija_. Why don't we leave _mamá_ alone, _sí?_ ")

On her deathbed, surrounded by her _familia_ , Imelda Rivera couldn't have been more pleased. She had Elena and Franco, Victoria, Cocó and Julio, and Rosita. What more could she possibly want? She had created a prosperous life and a wonderful family for herself, all without that faithless _músico_.

Ignoring that despairing niggling itch about her long lost love in the back of her mind, Imelda closed her eyes and sighed contentedly.

* * *

 

As time passed, Héctor grew worse and worse.

But it was like that for all the Forgotten in Shantytown. Back when Héctor was still new to the land of the dead, back when he still thought Imelda would put up his picture up on _Día de los Muertos_ , back when he still had hope, Héctor would gape in horror at the Forgotten. Fathomless despairing eyes, brittle yellowed bones that cracked and crumbled, all accompanied by morbid humor and a tight smile.

They had long ago accepted that no one cared.

He hadn't yet.

What a _tonto engañado_ he was.

Years later, after Imelda had arrived and chased him away from her house with furious yells and a violent _bien merecido_ beating with her shoe, and as the small shack he'd miraculously acquired started to fall apart from the weight of a hundred years, he found that he looked just like them.

He felt that same disturbing hunger when he looked at the bright clean Remembered and the pure joy they had. The way their bones shone in the sun, the sign that their _familia_ was coming for them. Héctor felt like a puppet who's strings had been cut, inspirationless, directionless, purposeless. Hollow joints knocking together and no ties to anyone or anything, something that had once been a person held together by suspenders, duck tape, and memories of people who had forgotten him.

He'd accepted long ago that his _familia_ had forgotten him, that Imelda- _maravilloso_ , _hermosa_ , Imelda hated his guts. Or, well, his lack of guts? His bones? Eh, _quien sabe._ His bones were in disrepair and he fell apart like water in a sieve, his limbs as reluctant to go together as mismatched puzzle pieces. Just like them. He wondered if his eyes were as hollow as theirs. He knew his bones were certainly that same sickly shade of _amarillo_ , broken only by breaks and scrapes that refused to heal. He even joked about death with the best of them, but... There was still something that stubbornly refused to change.

Despite his situation and his harsh experiences, the exasperated sighs of the security guards he knew by name on every _Día_ _de los Muertos_ , he still had something keeping him alive. And that was Cocó.

Each night, despite the fact that he did not have his guitar, he would settle into where he was staying for the moment and he would sing their song. He knew, she was singing along. He _hoped_. He hoped she was somewhere singing _Recuérdame_.

She was the only one left, the last one, who knew him in life. She had to remember him. She had too.

Héctor buried his head in his hollow hands, despair rippling through him. If he wasn't a skeleton, he might've cried. Cocó would've looked immensely worried for one so young and she'd say with a tentative smile and a small hand on his arm, ' _Papi_ , _no llores. Está bien. Está bien, Papi._ '

As if her saying it was alright would make it so. Cocó was nearly ninety now. She'd been alive far longer than he had, almost four times as much. She'd had ninety birthdays, children and then grandchildren, so many firsts and so many tragedies and so much life that he had never been there for. He hadn't even been able to watch her grow every year, the lack of a photo on the _ofrenda_ preventing even the slightest comfort of watching from afar.

He thought of her holding his comically large hand and skipping along the cobblestone street in her pink dress and ribbons, humming ' _Un Poco Loco._ ' Her hands would not be so small. He remembered the way she tilted her head whenever he grew despondent at the thought of leaving them, the sad look in her soft brown eyes and her happy, " _Está bien, Papi._ " Héctor's sharp hands tightened on his dirty skull as he let out a choked painful laugh, " _Ay mi amor, mi amor._ "

As the sun rose, bright and full, on yet another unsuccessful _Día de los Muertos_ , a hollow skeleton sat in a rundown shanty and tried to remember what he was fighting for.


End file.
